Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Caroline Plante reports on Quebec's scourge of medical extra-billing and user fees (as identified by its own Auditor General). And Aaron Derfel notes that the federal government has done nothing to apply the Canada Health Act to rein in the practice.

- Erika Shaker highlights how federal funding for post-secondary education serves mostly to provide further advantages for students who already have the most.

- The Star makes the case for the Communications Security Establishment to answer for breaches of Canadians' privacy. And Kaveh Waddell discusses how big data in the hands of the corporate sector can lead to systematic discrimination against poor communities, while Dennis Howlett challenges KPMG's claim that confidentiality entitles tax cheats to avoid exposure.

- Susan Delacourt offers a few suggestions as to how Justin Trudeau could usefully use some political capital - with a particular focus on reversing the Cons' attacks on the political system. And Kelly McParland notes that the Cons themselves may be continuing down the path of artificial barriers against experience and competence with internal leadership term limits.

- Finally, Trish Kahle discusses the shared interest of the labour and environmental movements in a sustainable economy.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Thom Hartmann highlights how trickle-down economics have swamped the U.S.' middle class:

Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it “Voodoo Economics.” And we’re still in the era of Reaganomics – as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.

This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.

And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and ’70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement – social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era’s middle class – these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they’ve made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.

We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we’ve been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can’t have both.

And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.

- Meanwhile, Robert Reich discusses how the U.S.' economy is rigged to generate perpetually increasing inequality.

- Eric Ravenscraft writes about the high cost of living in poverty. Marc Spooner argues that ignoring the plight of Saskatchewan's homeless people makes everybody worse off. And Valerie Tarasuk makes the point that funneling waste through food banks does nothing to help a systematic lack of access to food or other necessities of life.

- Brent Patterson makes the case for public hearings before Canada gets locked into the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Derrick O'Keefe writes that the corporate media has been teaming up with the Libs and Cons to make sure serious criticisms of the TPP are waved away.

- Finally, Rosario Marchese writes that it's not too late for the Wynne Liberals to reverse their disastrous Hydro One privatization, while Kelly McParland notes that the selloff involves all the financial planning and foresight of needlessly taking out a payday loan. And CBC reports that Ontario is already following the consistent pattern of privatized electrical utilities leading to higher rates for customers (in addition to lower public revenues).

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jim Stanford discusses how the Trans-Pacific Partnership is renegotiating NAFTA - and taking away what little Canada salvaged in that deal. And Jared Bernstein highlights the TPP's impact on prescription drug costs.

- Rick Smith rightly challenges the effort some people have made to minimize the difference between Canada's political parties:

Though the constant spinning of basically unchanging polling results is annoying, I’m not sure it’s corrosive to the democratic process.  On the other hand, the notion that it doesn’t matter who we elect is not only factually inaccurate, it does Canadians a disservice.

Over the past nine years an important part of the Conservative project has been to reduce participation in elections: restricting Election Canada’s ability to do outreach and education; making it harder for students and others to vote; and an outright disenfranchising of entire groups like Canadian expats. Diminishing the importance of voting just feeds this trend.  In fact, the only people who benefit from electoral nihilism are Conservatives, who have a vested interest in turning people off politics thereby keeping them home on election night.

Pretending that all politicians and party platforms are the same or shades of gray is also unfair to the many progressive community leaders running in this – and other elections — who are trying their damndest to actually make a difference. 

- But sadly, Kelly McParland only adds to Smith's list of commentators glossing over the real differences to create a narrative of voters tuning out the election.

- David Keith writes that the most scandalous element of Bruce Carson's involvement with the Cons is the role he and his oil industry cronies have played in exacerbating climate change. And Charles Mandel reports on yet another research library the Cons set out to destroy - though the good news is that in this case, PIPSC managed to step in before the damage was complete.

- Finally, Jeremy Nuttall reports that the Cons are also putting a price on previously-available information about temporary foreign workers. PressProgress finds a Con candidate telling young workers they should work for free rather than thinking paid employment is an option. And Sid Ryan offers his take on what the labour movement needs to do to improving working and living conditions for everybody.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Michael Harris rightly points out that a steady stream of scandals and incompetence from the Cons says plenty about Stephen Harper's own judgment (or lack thereof):

Sooner or later, the country is going to realize that there is something terribly wrong with Stephen Harper’s judgment.

And sooner or later, the Conservative party is going to realize one-man bands are great until the tuba player runs out of breath.

At the moment, judged only by his record in Senate appointments, Harper’s eye for talent appears to be made of glass.

Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy have become media migraines for the government. Both have tarnished the Tory brand. They were the PM’s picks. Blow the draft choices, face the consequences.
...
Like some of his appointments, the Senate itself is further evidence of poor judgment by the prime minister. Instead of the refreshing promise of reform, Harper has turned the Senate into a bank machine for the Conservative Party, using his appointees to raise money at endless fundraisers and to fiddle the system.

Harper’s broken promise is bad enough, especially the part about patronage having no role to play in the parliament of Canada. The reality check? No one has outdone the current PM in sending party hacks, bagmen, failed candidates and media sycophants to the trough.

The difference between this PM and his predecessors is that he didn’t stop at stacking the Senate with pork. He remorselessly used it as just another partisan forum, on one occasion deploying a patronage-based Senate to kill a climate-change bill that had already been passed by elected MPs. That hadn’t happened in seven decades.

- Meanwhile, Kelly McParland considers Mike Duffy to be a case in point as to how the Senate is long past its expiry date:

A senator’s primary residence would matter if the Senate still did the job for which it was originally intended, representing provincial interests in Ottawa. But the fact is it doesn’t: the provinces, led by their premiers, do that for themselves, as they have long done.

The leaves the Senate with its other mandate, acting as  a chamber of “sober second thought.”  Except it doesn’t do that either. There may be a small group of senators who add some value to the legislative process in Ottawa, but the majority are of the Duffy type, patronage appointments put there to agree with the prime minister who appointed them. For years the chamber acted as a Liberal nodding shop; more recently Prime Minister Stephen Harper has stuffed it with compliant Tory appointees, whose main job is to agree to reform themselves if and when Mr. Harper ever gets a Senate reform bill to that stage. How qualified can members be if they can’t even identify where they live?

That being the case, the situation faced by Sen. Duffy inadvertently illustrates why the Senate is no longer needed: because it has too many members like Mr. Duffy, whose consumption of public income and resources serves no purpose. Think of how much better served Canadians would be were Sen. Duffy to be retired, enabling him to spend all his time in Cavendish.

- Peter O'Neil reports that Preston Manning and Ed Broadbent have joined Kennedy Stewart's push to encourage a petition process which will at least ensure MPs consider issues of importance to citizens.

- Finally, Sid Ryan and Alex Himelfarb make the case for Ontario to look beyond the pain fixation of austerians:

Cutting our way to growth failed as a budget strategy in the 1930s and it will not work now. As economist Paul Krugman notes, government deficits are a symptom of a greater economic disease, not the disease itself. It follows then, that if we zealously tackle the symptom and ignore the disease, we risk making the situation much worse.

We need to understand how we got into deficit if we are to develop sensible, prudent policies. The evidence here is clear: loss of revenue and increased spending after the financial meltdown (although spending was not our problem before the recession and it isn’t now) and years of tax cuts that mostly benefited wealthy citizens and corporations to the tune of $15 billion while never delivering on their promise of growth and jobs.

Budgets that eliminate waste and reduce debt in good times are prudent budgets. Budgets that cut programs and services, lower wages, and maintain unaffordable tax cuts, especially when the economy is struggling, are neither prudent nor responsible.

It’s time to change the conversation on austerity, to talk about getting Ontarians back to work in jobs that pay a living wage, to talk about revenues and not just cuts, to talk about building a better future together.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan looks at the principled leadership which Stephen Harper embarrassingly made into an attack on the NDP as an example what Canada desperately needs now:

Repeating that war settles nothing, Mr. Woodsworth declared: “I rejoice that it is possible to say these things in a Canadian Parliament under British institutions. It would not be possible in Germany, I recognize that ... and I want to maintain the very essence of our British institutions of real liberty. I believe that the only way to do it is by an appeal to the moral forces which are still resident among our people, and not by another resort to brute force.”

He alone rose to record his opposition to the declaration of war.

In the words of Tommy Douglas’s biographers Thomas and Ian McLeod: “This event is considered by many to be one of the finest moments in the history of the Canadian Parliament. Even as every other member of the House of Commons voted to declare war, Mr. Woodsworth was recognized for his courageous ethical stand and his commitment to his principles.”

Through two decades as independent MP and then as leader of the small CCF parliamentary rump, no one challenged the King government more profoundly than J. S. Woodsworth, constantly seeking the better angels of Mackenzie King’s nature. In the end, addressing his own historic motion for war, the prime minister said:

“There are few men in this Parliament for whom I have greater respect than the leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. I admire him in my heart, because time and again he has had the courage to say what lays on his conscience, regardless of what the world might think of him. A man of that calibre is an ornament to any Parliament.”

And Tabatha Southey comments on the NDP's proud history of time travel which serves as the only logical explanation for the Cons' spin.

- Meanwhile, Jeffrey Simpson criticizes the Cons' efforts to rewrite Canada's past:

In the last budget, for example, funding was reduced for Library and Archives Canada, the CBC, Telefilm Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Parks Canada by a government that had already scrapped plans for a National Portrait Gallery. (The government also is eliminating support for scholars in other countries who study Canada.)
...
By contrast, the government found money in a “restraint” budget for projects that will allow it to highlight those scattered and fading (or faded) remnants of our history that suit the government’s political agenda: recreations of the War of 1812 (a political civil war on each side and a cross-border military conflict), medals commemorating the Queen, and yet another royal visit, this one offering Canadians (or at least the handful of them who will care) the emotional surge of seeing their future king and queen: Charles and Camilla.

For the Harper Conservatives, there’s no sense of contributing to a new or evolved sense of Canadian identity, but rather a reaching back and dusting off of fragments of the past that suit their politics – which is why the military and the monarchy are their favoured subjects for historical attention.
...
History is never written in stone; it’s always being checked and rechecked, written and rewritten. Arguments about the past never cease, and it’s intellectually worthwhile for such arguments to be made by those who learn history and/or write it, often with the support of the very institutions the government’s now cutting.

When governments take up the pen, fill it with the ink of public money, and start rewriting the past, political agendas chase the search for historical understanding.

- Kelly McParland sees haste and secrecy as the two main products of the Cons' omnibus budget legislation. Bill Curry reports that the Cons plan to dictate who's eligible to receive EI benefits with no input from anybody else - least of all the workers who have paid into the program. And Thomas Walkom observes that the Cons' strategy looks to be to attack wages and the environment exactly as much as they can get away with without inciting outright panic:

The Harper revolution has never been about abortion or gay rights. This prime minister has little interest in social conservatism.

Rather, the revolution is economic. It is aimed at eliminating regulations — particularly environmental regulations — that interfere in profit-making. It is aimed at reducing wages (which is why the Conservatives take swipes at unions whenever possible). It is aimed at scaling back any social programs — from Old Age Security to Employment Insurance — that help keep wages up.

The revolutionaries dream of a day when the elderly, energized by the reductions in their pensions, will be vying for jobs at Walmart.

But it is a stealthy revolution. The country must remain complacent. Otherwise, we might object.

- Peter O'Neil notes that provinces are joining the group of voices concerned about the effect of a free trade agreement with Europe which would lock in higher pharmaceutical prices for no apparent benefit.

- And finally, Martin Canning comments on the future of political micro-targeting.

Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Alex Himelfarb laments the Cons' dismantling of a progressive state in Canada. But lest we lose all hope, Annie Lowrey reports on the Piketty/Saez economic work that's paving the way for fairer taxes in the U.S. And Kelly McParland has to admit that more progressive taxes are entirely supported by the public even as he registers his disapproval for having the wealthy pay a fair share.

- Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher report that Robocon has predictably been traced back to the Cons' central campaign. And Sixth Estate looks in more detail at the latest revelations.

- On the provincial scene, we're learning more and more about Alberta's apparent government-in-waiting. But that isn't to say we should be any more pleased with the current administration - and Jenn Prosser is optimistic that saner heads may prevail in Lethbridge. Meanwhile, Bill Tieleman notes that the B.C. Libs are getting abandoned even by their upper-class base.

- Finally, Tom Spears documents what may be the definitive example of the Cons' message control working precisely as it's supposed to - and utterly wasting public resources in the process.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Greg Weston nicely chronicles Peter MacKay's flat-out lies about how he came to take a $30,000 helicopter ride. And while Weston despairs about the likelihood that MacKay will pay any price, he does point out why we shouldn't accept anything less:

Few things corrode the effectiveness of our democratic system more than dishonesty among those elected, appointed or hired to serve the public.

As much as honest politics may seem oxymoronic to many Canadians, feeding the public a crock is not a victimless offence.

What is the impact on the morale of the dedicated men and women of Canada's armed forces when their defence minister claims his misuse of a military helicopter as a personal taxi was merely participating in a search-and-rescue demonstration?

What message are Canada's more than 250,000 federal public servants supposed to take away from MacKay's example as they go about their jobs spending taxpayers' money?

If politicians lie about the small stuff, why would ordinary Canadians believe anything the government says on matters of grave importance?

- Meanwhile, Kelly McParland notes that the Cons are using every dirty Nixonian trick they can think of in trying to tear down any semblance of opposition.

- Patricia Pearson points out how federal intervention has created massive problems for remote First Nations. And Bob Lovelace worries that the Cons are planning to use their own failings as an excuse to push First Nations out of their home communities.

- The Economist weighs in against the Cons' dumb-on-crime legislation.

- Finally, John Geddes' wish list for 2012 includes a hope that we'll see an end to disingenuous attempts to reform the Senate, with a genuine push toward abolition in their place.

Tuesday Evening Links

This and that to end your Tuesday.

- The Ottawa Citizen tears a strip off the Cons' G8 patronage and cover-up:

The more details emerge about the way the government funnelled money into the Muskoka region under the convenient category of "G8 legacy infrastructure," the more "smalltown cheap" the whole thing looks.
...
In a sense, none of this money was theirs to spend. Parliament approved the funding under the mistaken impression that it was for border infrastructure.

In a larger sense, the government never had any business throwing public money around like this. Yes, municipalities were and are in sore need of a better model for infrastructure funding. But using an international summit as a tenuous excuse to create a oneoff, regional fund is not a good way to accomplish that goal. It's a good way to create the circumstances for cronyism and waste.

- And even Kelly McParland is less than impressed:

Now we discover, thanks to some innovative digging by the NDP, that Mr. Clement took personal command of the $50 million, setting up a command centre in his riding headquarters, creating a mini-council consisting of himself, the mayor of Huntsville and a local resort manager to sift through projects and pick the ones they liked. He convened meetings with area mayors to get input, dragged in bureaucrats from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Industry Canada, and Infrastructure Canada, and managed to avoid leaving a paper trail that might prove embarrassing if someone started poking their nose into his activities later.

Someone did start sniffing around — Auditor General Sheila Fraser — but even her formidable investigative skills missed the extent of what Clement was up to, or the fact he had the bureaucrats helping him out. And without supporting documentation, which seem be mysteriously absent, the Auditor General couldn’t tell whether projects were suitably chosen or not.

It’s not the way things are supposed to be done. The government isn’t supposed to just hand $50 million to a local MP and tell him to pick some projects for it. There’s red tape to be dealt with, and not all of it unnecessarily. There are standards and procedures to be satisfied when spending taxpayers’ dollars, and the whole Clement operation seems to have been organized to get around them.
...
Cover-up. Slush fund, Secret committee. No paper trail. All we need is Howard Hunt, a hidden tape machine and a trail of dirty campaign tricks and we could have a real scandal here.

- And pogge reminds us that it isn't Tony Clement that nominally approved the Cons' G8 spending - meaning that John Baird has plenty to answer for as well.

- Aaron Wherry painstakingly lists the topics for which the Cons have claimed a mandate from May's election. But for a next step, let's note that multiple topics on the list (attacking Air Canada workers, slashing the civil service, and cutting search and rescue operations as prime examples) are issues which were mentioned approximately zero times as part of the campaign which the Cons claim to have provided them with that mandate.

- Finally, Joe Comartin signals that the NDP is looking to point out how the Cons' disdain for evidence and rational policy-making conflicts with the values of Canada's legal community:

Joe Comartin says the country’s lawyers and judges are “offended professionally” by the Harper government’s law-and-order agenda, which is prohibiting any changes to its mandatory minimum sentencing legislation.

“They find this offensive as lawyers,” the NDP justice critic told The Globe. “The evidence is overwhelming this is the wrong approach. ... [Lawyers are] just so offended that they are shifting the criminal justice system as dramatically as it should be. They are offended professionally the government would do this.”
...
Lawyers at the CBA meeting were strong in their condemnation of the government’s tough-on-crime agenda, and its position on sentencing. And Mr. Comartin, a former defence lawyer, said past governments would consult with the legal profession if significant changes were being proposed. This one, he says, does not.
...
He added that the NDP continues to oppose the proposed legislation, pushing prevention rather than punishment and “knowing this is the most effective way to protect our citizens.”

Well said

John Moore nicely rebuts the claim that we should be grateful for the privilege of paying obscene amounts to our corporate betters:

The average working Canadian earns $43,000 a year. The average for the top 100 CEOs is 155 times that. Roll that figure around for a second. Think of what you earn in a year. Now imagine being paid 155 times more. Not twice as much. Not 10 times. 155 times.

That’s not merit. That’s not about stockholder value. That’s a shakedown. And it’s further proof that when elites are responsible for their own pay, they make out like bandits. Kelly insists that boards of directors set executive compensation based on shareholder value, ignoring the fact that directors come from the same spoiled-rotten, self-entitled class as the CEOs they hire and pay.
...
These aren’t entrepreneurs, venture capitalists or private company owners. They are nothing more than high ranking employees. Yet they expect their earnings to rival those of people who risk all and genuinely create wealth. And often they grow their companies through massive layoffs of those who earn less.

In his column lampooning the executive-compensation study, Kelly McParland insists “the money doesn’t come from your pocket or mine.” It most certainly does if we are shareholders. More importantly, thanks to the vagaries of Canadian tax laws, when executives exercise their generous stock options, taxpayers are on the hook. The average lost tax revenue for each of the 100 top paid CEOs in Canada amounted to $467,000. That’s a heck of a lot more galling than the sundry restaurant receipts of some scandal-plagued assistant deputy minister, but it seems the fans of big business can’t get worked up about it.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday.

- It would be nice to be able to believe that the U.S.' greenhouse gas emissions regulations would lead to some action on our side of the border as well. But is there actually any realistic prospect that the Cons' won't simply give the Wheel of Excuses another spin - likely landing on "Made In Canada!" again - in order to avoid doing anything meaningful in response?

- The Star weighs in on the ever-more-appalling gap between CEO pay and the income of Canadians in general, and echoes the CCPA's proposed solution to at least part of the problem:

Basing pay on the stock market is like rewarding a quarterback on the basis of whether his team beats the point spread, says Martin. And in the long run, the whole economy suffers, not just individual companies, as CEOs spend their time “jerking around expectations.”

Some argue that executive compensation ought to be of concern only to shareholders and corporate directors. But as Mackenzie notes, directors and CEOs are all members of the same “club,” and executive pay is based on what other club members are paid. “The logic is perfectly circular,” he writes.

As for giving shareholders “say on pay,” that just allows them to say they are unhappy with executive pay, says Mackenzie. “It does not mean they can actually do anything about it.”

A better option, adds Mackenzie, is for government to intervene -- starting with treatment of stock options as regular income, not capital gains, which are taxed at half the normal rate. That’s an idea for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to consider in his upcoming budget – or, if he is disinclined, for the opposition parties to adopt in their platforms.

- And amazingly, even Kelly McParland may not be entirely disagreeable toward the idea:

There is no question CEO pay has grown faster and more steadily than other income levels, and that much of it receives a favourable level of tax treatment the rest of us can only wish for. It’s a matter worthy of discussion, and serious treatment.

- Finally, Neal Lawson and John Harris have some suggestions for the UK's Labour Party which may resonate in Canada as well:

The new paradigm understands the nature of capitalism: a dynamic force that is as creative as it is destructive. Unless confronted, regulated and shaped, it undermines society and community - and crucially, its own positive aspects, as the trailblazing entrepreneur is sidelined by the monopoly corporation, and the once-thriving town centre gets killed by the faceless out-of-town mall. Moreover, if we don't regulate free markets, we end up regulating people, to force them to behave as the market desires - a fact glaringly reflected in the huge growth of the authoritarian state. Crucially, however, most regulation will increasingly have to happen at a transnational level - at the very least, via the European Union. Economic sovereignty will have to be pooled to ensure that damaging effects of capitalism are tamed. Every second of every day the bond market pools its sovereignty to destroy whole economies. This week it's Ireland, next week it is wherever they decide. This means controls on speculative capital flows and the ability to shift location and production to where taxes and labour conditions are lowest; it means coordinated corporation taxes and establishing the principle of a European minimum wage. The old social democracy never got this. Neither did it understand the demands of people for meaningful voice at their place of work. Capitalism is a tiger that we cannot ride but must tame.

New Socialism knows the state is vital but recognizes too the crisis of the bureaucratic and market state. It is Labour's grip of statism that must be broken. The New Socialism seeks to balances our need for security through the state with our right to freedom from the state. It wants a state whose scope is democratically determined and made accountable, responsive, sensitive and local through the most radical political reforms of public service this country has ever seen. A more proportional national electoral system is only one part of the change required: we have to reinvent the state from top to bottom to entrench people's involvement through the principle of co-production and the critical role of both producers and users of services. Health, education, social care and much more need to be liberated from the bureaucratic and outsourced state and reshaped accordingly, aiming at two transformative effects: creating in-built efficiencies through ongoing improvements on the frontline, and helping to make the tax case for the public sector. In the midst of the current fiscal crisis, the importance of this second element cannot be overstated.

Friday Afternoon Links

To help pass the time until the event apparently taking place at midnight.

- Aaron Wherry's year-end column is well worth a read in general. But it's particularly worth highlighting this piece:

(F)rom the far end of the room, often this year there was Mr. Harris and his gruff Newfoundland brogue (or perhaps it’s more of a twang). Here sometimes seemed a man who would set his teeth into your pant leg and not let go. That he and (the NDP) refused to go along with the negotiated agreement that followed the Speaker’s ruling and that they now pursue the participants from the outside is perhaps the only reason to believe the process will come to anything. Surely, if only to avoid proving them right, the Liberals and Bloc will be compelled to carry out their duties. Such is democracy. Or so we can hope.

Not that there's been much reason for optimism yet, mind you...

- LRT has some ideas on how an effort to offer big political choices rather than the usual microtargeted minutiae could result in much-needed change.

- Kelly McParland nicely illustrates why it's a sucker's bet for a self-identified progressive party to go out of its way to try to please the corporate sector. After a year where the McGuinty government gave business billions in free money by both slashing corporate tax rates and implementing the HST which exempts it from paying consumption taxes, it's treated to this from somebody who would seemingly agree entirely with its direction:

(W)e would settle for an incremental change: If Mr. McGuinty merely ceased forcing the province's corporations to pay for his grandiose ideas, Ontario might once again attract the investment it needs to be the engine of our economic growth.

- And finally, now's the time to get in one last donation in 2010.

Wednesday Morning Links

- The Cons have apparently unveiled version 2.0 of their dirty tricks manual, featuring such cooperative and productive steps as having the chair utterly ignore any rules that have ever existed in order to prevent elected officials from voting. Stay tuned for the next step, as I'm sure all Con chairs are training to shriek "LALALALALAICANTHEARYOU!!!" for the entire length of a meeting.

- Jeffrey Simpson is absolutely right in saying that the CRTC couldn't approve Corn Cob Kory's application for a massive subsidy of Fox News North without looking ridiculous in the process. But I'm not sure how one can comment on the topic without noting the risk that the final decision will be made at the political level, where any concerns about trampling on common sense and existing rules could easily be outweighed by the desire to fund the most biased right-wing media mouthpiece yet.

- Sure, it might seem ridiculous for Sask Party MLA Dan D'Autremont to declare that his constituents have to choose between highways and health care. But let's be fair to D'Autremont: when a government is consumed with taking constant orders from the corporate sector, there's an obvious reason why there's nothing left for mere citizens.

- Getting quoted in a major newspaper: good. Getting quoted in a major newspaper alongside Paul Wells: excellent. Getting quoted in a major newspaper alongside Kelly McParland: well, two out of three ain't bad.

Concern trolling par excellence

Shorter Kelly McParland:

If those lazy, shiftless, useless jack-booted bureaucratic thugs whose red tape destroys the economy and who suck from the public teat while bleeding hard-working Canadians dry don't agree to hand over some of their ill-gotten gains, then some unnamed persons might try to foment resentment against them. And we'd sure hate to see that.

Your money, his entertainment

Shorter Kelly McParland:

Alright, so some people might be rightly outraged at the amount of money and resources put into creating Stephen Harper's Olympic photo-ops. But would they feel better about the cost if it was in fact largely for Harper's personal amusement?

A resounding gold in hackery

Shorter Kelly McParland:

Nothing could be more heroic than to cultivate an irrational, unfocused anger at the abstract idea of government, then take it out on the nearest public servant who had no role in causing one's frustration. Embrace the hate!

On selective critiques

Kelly McParland offers up some fairly scathing criticism of a federal party:

(I)t's hardly a sign of firm convictions when a party is so bereft of fundamental beliefs it has to call a time out and ask for suggestions.

Which might be a good enough point if applied with even a modicum of consistency. But guess how much concern McParland has had about another federal leader who's shut down not only his own party's activities, but the legislative bodies governing the entire country based on a supposed need to "recalibrate" his plans?

Yeah, that makes sense

Shorter Kelly McParland:

In a country as complex and interconnected as today's Canada, the only effective form of government involves a single control freak insulated in his own personal echo chamber.

On questionable precedents

Apparently recognizing that "but...but...but...Chretien!" is wearing thin as a defence of the Harper government's misdeeds, Kelly MacParland unveils a radical new line of attack: "but...but...but...MacKenzie King!"

I particularly look forward to the forthcoming talking point that nobody would have complained when King accused his opponents of caring more about filthy Jap traitors than about Canadian troops abroad.

Egowarriors indeed

Shorter Kelly McParland:

It's impossible to take environmentalists seriously when a few of them have an unrealistically inflated sense of self-worth. Now stay tuned for part 738 of Ezra Levant's 2,105-part series, "Why Me and the Other Speech Warriors are like Gandhi, Jesus and Superman All Rolled Into One".

On selective patriotism

Shorter Kelly McParland, on learning that a single U.S. administration official had proposed treating Canada similarly to Mexico in terms of border issues:

Oh noes!!! We must drop everything and run - nay, SPRINT!!! - to the nearest megaphone and shout at the top of our lungs to defend our honour on border management and security, lest the slightest inaccuracy or unfair portrayal of Canada affect U.S. policy!!!! SHRIEEEEEK!!!!


Shorter Kelly McParland on the suggestion that it might be a good idea to point out a few of the inaccuracies being spread about Canada's health care system within the U.S. health care debate:

Meh. Why should anybody care whether one of the U.S.' major political parties uses every moment available to it on airwaves which cut through both countries to fabricate conspiracy theories about our health care system? After all, it's not as if it matters what they do anyway.

(Edit: added label & fixed wording.)